Framed Memories of Berlin: Film, Architecture and Remembrance

Abstract

Collective memory can be defined as a shared notion of how a social group constructs its past. Architecture and cinema play a major role in the creation of collective memory, buildings by structuring lived experiences and films by framing, re-presenting and fixing those experiences so they can be collectively revisited. In this study, well-known films of Berlin from throughout the twentieth century, both fiction and non-fiction, are studied to explore their contribution to the memory-making process in a city subject to repeated destruction. In images, the current version of various prominent film locations is juxtaposed with its filmic counterpart to highlight both continuities and discontinuities and to ask after their role in remembrance.

Keywords:

• Berlin
• cinematic city
• collective memory
• film architecture
• location film
• urban development

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the German Cinematic Museum for Film and Television for archival support, editor Diana Periton for her active involvement in the editing process, and long-time Berliners Christoph Hoff and Elsbeth Zylla for their ever-present hospitality. Different versions of this research were presented in 2013, at the 2nd All-Ireland Architecture Research Group (AIARG) Conference, Emerging Research, Limerick, Ireland; the 7th International Cultural Studies Conference, Memory and Culture, Ankara, Turkey; the Cinematic Urban Geographies Conference, Cambridge, UK; and the Queen's University Belfast–University College Dublin (QUB–UCD) Ph.D. Conference, Belfast, UK (keynote address) in 2016.

Notes

Notes

1 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.

2 Richard Koeck, Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (London: Routledge, 2013), 6.

3 Shelley Hornstein, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 3.

4 Stephen Barber, “The Skladanowsky Brothers: The Devil Knows,” Senses of Cinema 56 (October 2010). Available online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/the-skladanowsky-brothers-the-devil-knows (accessed June 8, 2016).

5 Colin McArthur in David Clarke, The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), 20.

6 Todd Herzog in Susan Ingram, ed., World Film Locations: Berlin (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 116.

7 Curt and Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1930) also visualizes the daily life of Berlin as a growing industrial city, focusing primarily on leisure.

8 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 194.

9 In 2002, Thomas Schadt made an updated Berlin Symphony depicting life in contemporary Berlin.

10 The torch relay was devised originally for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games; Riefenstahl restaged it for the film.

11 “Leni Riefenstahl,” in Fine Art Photography Series (Visual Arts Cork), s.v. Available online: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/photography/leni-riefenstahl.htm (accessed July 12, 2017).

12 Leni Riefenstahl, cited in Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975). Available online: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism (accessed July 13, 2017).

13 Carson Philips in Ingram, World Film Locations: Berlin, 34.

14 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.”

15 The film’s title is more literally translated as The Battle for Berlin.

16 This separation led to a kind of schizophrenia: East and West Berlin went about parallel lives, in full view of each other, but with little contact between them. The contact that was possible (separated families were able to meet occasionally) was complicated, long-winded and painful.

17 The UFA film studios in Babelsberg (founded 1917), where Metropolis and Triumph of the Will were made, were taken over by DEFA in 1946.

18 Elaine Lennon, “Billy Wilder’s Berlin Women: A Foreign Affair (1948),” Off Screen 19, no. 3 (2015). Available online: http://offscreen.com/view/billy-wilders-a-foreign-affair (accessed November 20, 2017).

19 Wilder, who moved to the United States in 1933, learned in 1945 that his family had died some time earlier in Auschwitz.

20 Rossellini was describing his first visit to the postwar city in March 1947, when much of the filming took place; he could almost have been describing his own opening sequence in this interview for Cahiers du Cinéma (1955). This translation is published in Brianne Schieber, “Film Review: Germany Year Zero,” Identity Theory (February 2001). Available online: http://www.identitytheory.com/germany-year (accessed November 20, 2017).

21 Germany Year Zero won first prize at the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, in 1947, and Rossellini was named best director.

22 Mila Ganeva in Ingram, World Film Locations: Berlin, 49.

23 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 103.

24 Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 200.

25 Harold Pinter, cited in Thomas Adler, “Pinter’s Night: A Stroll Down Memory Lane,” Modern Drama 17, no. 4 (1974): 461–465, at 462.

26 Jeff Byles, Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition (New York: Three Rivers, 2006), 2.

27 Architecture and cinema work differently within the memory-making process. Since architecture is often an official practice performed by institutions and those in power, its relationship with memory-making frequently follows the intentions of the status quo. Instead, cinema, which often critiques the status quo, constructs an alternative process of memory-making by freezing momentary situations in time and space. Whilst the construction and demolition of buildings can be seen as direct manipulations of memory, film production manipulates memory in an indirect manner and occasionally reveals what the status quo wants society to forget.

28 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 130.

29 Wim Wenders in Coco Fusco, “Angels, History and Poetic Fantasy: An Interview with Wim Wenders,” Cineaste 16, no. 4 (1988): 14–17, at 16.

30 This unusual depiction of heaven in black-and-white and the earth in colour can also be found in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

31 James Hay in Clarke, Cinematic City, 222.

32 In the 1990s, Twyker and Becker were two of the co-founders of a film production company, X Films Creative Pool.

33 Clarke, Cinematic City, 165.

34 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory [1925] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 84. Halbwach’s title was Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (the social frameworks of memory).

35 Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), 52.

36 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1880] (New York: Dover, 1989), 169.

37 Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 1.

38 Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion, 2002), 8–9.

39 Barry Schwartz, “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces 61, no. 2 (1982): 374–402, at 374.

40 Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 3.

41 Alan Marcus and Dietrich Neumann, eds., Visualizing the City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 14.

42 François Penz and Andong Lu, eds., Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gul Kacmaz Erk

Gul Kacmaz Erk is B.Sc. Architecture Program Coordinator at Queen’s University Belfast. Having received her B.Arch./M.Arch. degrees (METU) and Ph.D. in Architecture (Istanbul Technical University), she undertook research at the University of Pennsylvania and University College Dublin. She has taught at Philadelphia University, TU Delft and Izmir University of Economics, and conducted urban filmmaking workshops in Ireland, the UK and Turkey. She is author of Architecture in Cinema: A Relation of Representation Based on Space (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009).

Christopher Wilson

Christopher Wilson is Architecture and Design Historian at Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida. He holds a B.Arch. degree (Temple University), M.A. (Architectural Association, London) and Ph.D. in Architecture (METU). He has practiced and taught in the United States, Britain and Turkey as well as Berlin. He is author of Beyond Anıtkabir: The Construction and Maintenance of National Memory in the Funerary Architecture of Mustafa Kemal Atatu¨rk (Ashgate, 2013).